


Into The Dark

by ScriveSpinster



Series: Urchins in the High Wilderness [3]
Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar, Sunless Skies
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, the truth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-07 03:00:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19076131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScriveSpinster/pseuds/ScriveSpinster
Summary: The Woman in the Lightning-Strike Scarf has little use for gods or kings.





	Into The Dark

**Author's Note:**

> The character here is the Nurse’s Sister from _The Heart, the Devil, and the Zee,_ but I figure she’s not going to be known solely in relation to her sister all her life, and she’s likely to hang on to that scarf.

The Woman in the Lightning-Strike Scarf makes her home in London’s lower levels, where the platforms are swathed in smog and joined by cables, ladders, and even now, by fraying hempen rope. It’s an inverse of the Flit, this place: not a rooftop city but a hanging archipelago, industry above and nothing but sky below. The wind still whistles through the cracks in thin walls and sings in the cables – though it’s a different wind than the one she remembers – and children still chase it fleet-footed across swaying bridges, fearless, accustomed to heights. The consequences of falling are so much greater. 

She makes it her business to know these platforms, and the people who inhabit them, so like and unlike the denizens of Spite she used to know. Here, she passes a shopfront offering wilted vegetables in varieties never seen on Earth, watched over by a tired-looking young woman who reminds her of the sister she lost to the zee. There, a junkyard selling scrap and salvage out front, smuggled starlight in the back. On that corner, she stops to pay respects at a shrine that wasn’t there yesterday, melted wax and dried petals scattered at the feet of a faceless clay idol. She doesn’t recognize the god it was built to honor, but that means little; new religions spring up like industrial fires down here, and old ones take new shapes, born of desperation for some refuge in the dark.

The Woman in the Lightning-Strike Scarf is a healer, not a priest. She left her gods behind in the Neath, and she mislikes the gods of the Heavens. Storm and Salt, in all their caprice, had at least been _theirs._ Stone had been kind. The stars and their children are distant, too often cruel and elsewise indifferent. But priest or not, she knows the cults of Lower London well, and has no quarrel with them. She’s worked alongside an itinerant Sequencer with visions in their bright eyes and lattices of glass growing along the path of their veins, and with nuns more used to weapons in their hands than bandages, struggling to reconcile faith with the revelations the skies have brought. A doctor who keeps the infirmary with her was once a candle cultist, and still bears the wounds; he’d asked her about her scarf – a scar beneath? – and she’d shaken her head and told him no, only a memory. Those that know what he had been still turn away when he enters a room, but she likes him fine, and trusts him more with the sick and injured than she would some crisp-suited upper city physician. He’s patient with the difficult ones, and forgiving of the ones with teeth.

He’s the one who’s with her when they’re called upon to treat a man brought in from a barely-skyworthy derelict found drifting out near the Ormswold’s boundary. The poor bastard is raving, when they find him, about dying gods and lamps that burn blue, and though he subsides to silence as they help him back to the infirmary, his eyes dart wildly from lamplight to shadowed corner to reflection in glass, as if he expects an enemy to be following. And even safe behind solid walls, with a blanket wrapped around his too-thin shoulders, he twitches at every flicker of motion.

The Woman in the Lightning-Strike Scarf glances at the Wax-Seared Doctor, who gives her a tired frown and shakes his head in sympathy. Out in the dark too long, they both agree, and what he needs more than anything else is sleep and food and safety. There’s nothing physically wrong with him beyond malnourishment and too much starlight, but he’s terrified beyond all reason. 

“The stars,” the man says, grasping at her hands like he can feel himself falling. “The stars are sick, doctor. They’re going out, one by one.”

“Here now,” the Wax-Seared Doctor says, holding out a cup of broth. “Drink. You can tell us when you’re rested.”

The patient shakes his head, pushing the offering away, and turns desperate eyes to her. 

“Ask the Airy,” he says. “Just bloody ask, they’ll tell you true.”

She doesn’t know what it is that he recognizes in her, to make him think she’ll listen to what others would dismiss as madness. Maybe she’s got a bit of Storm’s touch to her still, a little lightning in her eyes like she had as a child in the Neath. Maybe it’s just that she’s there, and hasn’t dismissed him yet.

“Will you let me take this?” she asks, touching the leather-bound journal he keeps clutched to his chest. He shoves it towards her, tells her, “ _Please._ ”

She promises to read it through, and that’s enough to calm him. He drinks his broth with shaking hands. He bathes, and takes his rest, and whenever he wakes with a scream caught between clenched teeth, she or the Doctor are there with a cup of tea and a kind word. And while he sleeps, she reads until long past the hour when she too should be sleeping, by the light of a lamp the Wax-Seared Doctor brings her.

By the second chapter, documenting with meticulous care a pattern of absences in the sky where absences should not be, she can feel a chill running up the back of her neck. By the third, she’s caught on to the cipher, though it takes longer by far to crack it. When the morning comes, she’s still awake, bleary-eyed, in a walking dream of stars gone dark with no supernovae to mark their passing.

It’s the Doctor who shakes her out of it, clearing his throat to alert her to his presence behind her. He’s brought her tea and porridge, sweet with honey. The poor man always feeds people, when he doesn’t know what else to do. And he hovers, twisting the sober fabric of his coat between scarred fingers, until at last he racks up the nerve to say, “You believe him.”

“I believe these notes,” she says. She doesn’t understand half of them, and even the documents’ nameless author admits that there is little _proof_ , their calculations made unreliable by the nature of crystallized time, the curvature of space and the uncertainty inherent in lawless distances. But she understands duty – asks herself, even now, what her sister would have done when faced with it – and she might have turned her back on gods, but there’s one thing she does know well.

“If it is a sickness,” she says slowly. “If it’s something can be cured, or stopped...”

She doesn’t like the stars, but a doctor doesn’t have to like her patients. She just has to save them. And if she manages that... might not a common healer then stand before a king and demand concession? Might she not say, _Your life was in my hands, and I gave it back to you, and so I demand in turn the lives of all that I hold dear?_

She has to laugh at herself for that. Even _if_ she should somehow succeed, they would doubtless only strike her down for her arrogance; even mortal royalty are seldom known for gratitude. But she had believed once that any chance was a chance worth taking; maybe she‘d been right about a few things, that girl who used to climb the crumbling facade of Old Downey just to meet the storm face to face. And beneath all that speculation, she can hear the call of wanderlust again, the same tide that pulled her from the charity school to the Fisher Kings, and her sister out to zee.

In that, though, she’s alone. When she says she means to leave, as soon as she can find someone trustworthy to take on her duties here, the Wax-Seared Doctor will not meet her eyes. She cannot blame him for having had enough of doomed quests and secrets, but he blames himself; he’s afraid, and ashamed of his fear.

She clasps his bony hand between her own, and says, “Someone has to care for the ones who stay behind.”

“And the ones who come back,” he says. “Be careful out there.”

She will, as much as she can be.

It won’t be difficult, finding passage. There’s not a train in the Wilderness that doesn’t need a good doctor. The question, then, is where to start.

 _The source,_ she thinks. The Observatory. One way or another, they’ll be able to teach her something she needs to know. And after that... the Reach, maybe, where the Garden-King had perished long ago, or the great shattered library that travelers spoke of, carrying tales from Eleutheria. It might be real. It might be rumor only. All she knows is that for the first time in years, she can almost feel the lightning in her blood, and hear the storm singing in her ears, calling her onward into the unknown.

There’s a universe of secrets out there, in Albion and elsewhere. She’s going to find the truth.


End file.
